English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

The Cult(ure) of Celebrity

M. ElizMark Conroy. Muse in the Machine: American Fiction and Mass Publicity. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004. 232 pp. $42.95.

By Joseph Dewey, University of Pittsburgh—Johnstown  

It is a most curious time to be a writer of serious intention in America. Stephen King figures in more dissertations filed in the last two years than does John Barth. The techno-thrillers of Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton are routinely discussed at prestigious literary conferences. Jonathan Franzen smack-talks Oprah over the low-octane discussions on her Book Club shows, while on another Club show, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison patiently responds to an earnest studio-audience query concerning “all that eye stuff” in The Bluest Eye. John Updike cameos on The Simpsons as the ghostwriter of Krusty the Clown’s show-biz autobiography. Michael Chabon, after garnering a Pulitzer Prize, then turns his attention with unseemly relish to scripting the sequel to Spiderman. Unprecedented frenzy surrounds the mid-90s release of David Foster Wallace’s baroque Infinite Jest—which quickly becomes the decade’s book to own but not actually read. William Gaddis, perhaps the most audacious novelist of his generation, dies without fanfare just months after the entire civilized world indulges a week of keening over the death of Princess Diana, a woman so slight, so vapid her persona was entirely carved by the flash of paparazzi cameras. Maya Angelou intones a soaring Inauguration poem for Bill Clinton and then endorses a line of pricey greeting cards with trite platitudes script-written across gauzy images of lakes and mountains and other such New Age iconography. The terminally cute Nicholas Sparks, after endless rounds of promotional interviews and feel-good feature pieces on network television, generates pandemonium when he stops at a Manhattan Starbuck’s—while Don DeLillo regularly attends Yankee games, glove in hand, unbothered, unrecognized.

Who, then, are our representative writers? What makes serious literature serious? What is the difference between high and low (pardon me, folk) culture? Has the seductive glare of media hype affected the production of serious fiction? Does serious literature survive today outside the protective hothouse of academia? In an era whose defining literature is largely composed of feel-good self-help manuals, Chicken Soup for Troubled fill-in-the-blank, quick-spun celebrity bios, and extremist screeds and polemics, where exactly does serious literature thrive?  Has the unprecedented reach of celebrity, the unrelentingly press of publicity, and the wonderland logic of a media culture diminished or enhanced the profession of writer? Consider the ramifications of the computer age itself--Internet realities such as electronic books, the bizarre rants of fanzine websites and open-access bulletin boards, the public relations whiz-bang of publisher websites, the faux-intimacy of author web pages—in a single era, a scant twenty-five years, the very definition of a “book” as an object, a product, as a marketplace good, has undergone radical (and permanent) redefinition even as literary critics across the spectrum either coldly abandon texts to pursue obscure theoretical agendas or petulantly bemoan the fast approaching extinction of the art of reading—you remember reading, that demanding, interactive intellectual exertion, that appears now as quaintly nostalgic as candle-dipping or quilting, dulled to irrelevancy by a generation of slack-jawed a-literates enthralled by the spectacle glitz of domestic video entertainment technologies. Who has time for Hester Prynne’s moral dilemma—there are federal drug agents to ambush in the two-dimensional backstreets of a virtual 1980s Miami.

            These are indeed provocative speculations. As Mark Conroy points out in his enticing Introduction, American literary culture has never been able to settle the quandary of the marketplace—Hawthorne bemoaned the popularity of his era’s women writers, a frustrated Melville exiled himself to the Manhattan customs office, Poe relentlessly sought marketplace affirmation. Indeed, each generation relishes the opportunity to “discover” long-dead neglected writers, finding in such neglect the self-congratulatory premise that we, the later generations, are singularly gifted, far more sensitive—which begs the obvious: even today, in one week, more people will be seduced by the slick accessibility of Nicholas Sparks than will tackle Moby-Dick in a year. This quandary provides entrance to the study at hand, a look at a critical tension particularly evident in the national literature of a capitalist experiment on the scale of the United States: the drama between author and audience, a nearly 200-year complex of mutual need and disdain. Conroy drafts an intriguing line-up: Henry James, Nathanael West, Vladimir Nabokov, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon, a virtual who’s-who of defining literary voices who nevertheless have managed only to skirt popular embrace or, worse, have achieved popularity with works that lack the gravitas of their defining works. It is in short a tantalizing premise for a study.

            Which is to say Conroy promises more than he appears to want to deliver. This could have been an audacious study. The premise Conroy sets up in the Introduction really requires a sweeping eye, an alert, hip cultural sensibility with reach and scale, able to draw from a vast and significant reservoir of high and low referents from literature, film, television, even the Internet. When Conroy delivers this sort of argument (as in the Introduction and the regrettably brief Epilogue), we sense the study that might have been. But in between the Introduction and Epilogue, Conroy is content to offer traditional conservative close-readings of a handful of familiar texts—among them, The Aspern Papers, Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust, Lolita, The Crying of Lot 49, and Mao II.  These close-readings work over the nuances of selected passages—but ultimately Conroy offers generously articulated readings that largely confirm all-too familiar critical takes on these seminal (and well-covered) works. Here, for instance, is Pynchon skewing the detective genre and drawing on the bleak metaphors of thermodynamics to critique a post-Eisenhower consumer culture that ultimately bestows on Oedipa Maas the difficult gift of insight; there is Nabokov playing out the implications of author-ity even as he assaults a culture’s morality and the psychology of ethics in a narrative that freely tests the tension between sleaze and art…etc, etc.

            More problematically, the chapters stay stubbornly discrete. Insufficient effort is expended to thread a common argument, to build a critical study chapter to chapter with a plot that would create a sense of cohesion and compatibility. The study is book-ended by texts that actually deploy writers as central consciousnesses—we begin with Henry James’s artist tales and end with DeLillo’s Mao II. In between, however, the figure of the writer reconfigures into other “related” enterprises—journalism, graphic arts, academia. Thus, inevitably, the tantalizing premise of the Introduction fades. There is an uncomfortable cut-and-paste feel here, inevitable when parts of the argument have appeared elsewhere. The readings collaborate only because they follow each other. Indeed, Conroy’s entire argument is tidily summarized in the third chapter, leaving the considerable rest the redundant work of underscoring and reemphasizing. The chapter jumps themselves can be disconcerting; we are shuttled from era to era with golf-umbrella sized generalities and the most casual causal links. Indeed, Conroy might have made more distinction in the enormous challenges posed by the visual media of the last fifty years, particularly the vast invasive cut of television and the reach of the computer.

            More curious, Conroy is content to applaud—or take issue—with exegesis that is sometimes twenty or thirty years old (his extensive bibliography, for instance, features only a handful of titles published in the last five years). This is particularly distressing when he deals with DeLillo. DeLillo is surely Conroy’s best opportunity to engage the questions he raises in the Introduction—to test the dilemma of a writer of serious intention in the age of pervasive media reach, a writer who in turn so intelligently, so directly critiques that very culture—but Conroy’s reading of Mao II would have been considerably fortified by some investigation into the DeLillo industry of the last decade.

Finally, the omissions here are too numerous, too glaring, and too curious to ignore— Hemingway, Mailer, Capote, Vidal to mention only the most obvious celebrity-writers of the era Conroy works. What about John P. Marquand or James Gould Cozzens, both hailed as significant writers of serious fiction by their mid-century culture (both appeared on the cover of Time) and yet now are consigned to deep obscurity. How would Conroy define the entire mid-century New Yorker school of fiction, what would he do, for instance, with Updike, his fiction always suspect because of its enormous market appeal. What about John Irving? Tom Wolfe? the entire Brat Pack of the Reagan Era—each a contrived performance piece, a public persona. What about the lure of Hollywood and the artistic compromise implied by scriptwriting? The considerable work of Woody Allen would have been intriguing to include. And, quite simply, the ongoing tragi-comedy of J. D. Salinger merits fuller mention in any study of the American writer and the burden of celebrity than a quick nod in the closing pages.

I guess I wish Conroy had done more to track the writer in the American culture of celebrity, had actually searched for the muse within the American machine. Appropriately in the media era that Conroy examines, his study reads more like a commercial, a teaser, a trailer for a study-surely-to-come, a study that will flesh-out the implications of the important questions Conroy raises.